On the Cutting Edge

Strong Undergraduate Geoscience Teaching

Project Description

On the Cutting Edge is a comprehensive, discipline-wide professional development program for current and future geoscience faculty that offers an integrated workshop series, a website with topical collections of teaching resources, and a leadership development program. It aims to develop a geoscience professoriate committed to high-quality instruction based on currency in scientific knowledge, good pedagogic practice, and research on learning with the ultimate goal of improving student learning. Initiated in 2002, the program is currently funded through Transforming Undergraduate Education in Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics five-year
grants awarded by the National Science Foundation Division of
Undergraduate Education to each of the PIs.

Underpinning On the Cutting Edge is the concept that, if faculty are engaged in a community where they can share and discuss their teaching and learn from others within and beyond the geosciences, then the quality of teaching will rise for individual faculty, ultimately improving student learning across the country. Our program, designed to develop and support such a learning community, has an integrated workshop series and a website of teaching resources. Workshops of different types, both face-to-face and virtual, engage faculty with different interests and at different points in their careers: emerging theme workshops accelerate introduction of new geoscience research or a new aspect of pedagogy; workshops about teaching a core geoscience topic bring together faculty who teach a topic that is part of the geoscience major; annual workshops that support faculty at various career stages, and large workshops disseminate best practices in teaching. The program also offers webinars, webinar series, and journal clubs. The program aims to expand to include advanced opportunities to encourage repeat participation. These experiences will enable ongoing learning for repeat participants at different stages in the evolution of their teaching skills.

This program builds on the emerging opportunities
of the Web to support workshop participants before, during,
and after the workshop, and to bring the workshop experience
to a larger audience. Each workshop has a virtual component
that supports participants by providing information about the
workshop, a resource collection relevant to the topic, and opportunities
for on-line discussion with other participants and leaders.
Following the workshop, web materials based on the workshop
experience are created to enable on-line learning by a broader
community and workshop discussion lists are opened to community
participation to enable broader discussion of the workshop content.
A major focus of the project is to experiment with a variety
of approaches for capturing workshop content in forms that enable
faculty around the country to engage in the workshop experience
on-line and to experiment with a variety of approaches for virtual professional development.

One of the aims of this project is to expand the network of
people who are willing and able to offer workshops and to assume
leadership roles in creating future professional development
opportunities. We will use workshops both to identify and to
prepare new leaders to take effective and proactive roles in
workshop development. Extensive pre-workshop discussions on
workshop content as well as strategies to promote active engagement
by participants help prepare the workshop presenters for their
leadership roles. In selecting leaders for future workshops
including on-line mentoring activities, we aim for a diverse
leadership pool, including those from underrepresented groups,
from a broad spectrum of geoscience specialties, and from a
wide variety of academic settings.

The project includes a research and evaluation
component aimed at three fundamental questions: 1) In what ways does a shift to a student-centered teaching philosophy have an impact on teaching practice and on student learning? 2) What impact does repeated participation in geoscience professional development have on individual teaching practice and on geoscience education nationwide? and 3) What impact does participation in a community of geoscience educators imbued with a culture of innovation similar to that of the research community have on a faculty member's teaching? In addition to the ongoing
evaluation of individual workshops (daily road-checks with daily
reporting to workshop leaders, interviews with workshop participants
during the workshop, and end-of workshop and longer term post-workshop
evaluations by participants and leaders), the project also expands in two key areas that address classroom practice and student learning: 1) direct measurement of changes in teaching practice through the Classroom Observation Project, and 2) evidence of change in student learning and attitudes resulting from changes in teaching practice through the Embedded Assessment Project. To evaluate the current
state of geoscience instruction, we are revising and administering a
survey of undergraduate geoscience education to determine how
faculty are currently teaching their courses, how they gain
information for teaching, and how they engage in scholarly work. This survey was administered in 2004, 2009, and was administered again in the Fall of 2012.

Provenance: Sean Fox, Carleton CollegeReuse: This item is offered under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike license http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/3.0/ You may reuse this item for non-commercial purposes as long as you provide attribution and offer any derivative works under a similar license.

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GSA supports On the Cutting Edge

The mission of The Geological Society of America is to advance geoscience research and discovery, service to society, stewardship of Earth, and the geosciences profession. We support geoscience education at every level. Join us at http://www.geosociety.org/

Provenance: NAGTReuse: This item is offered under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike license http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/3.0/ You may reuse this item for non-commercial purposes as long as you provide attribution and offer any derivative works under a similar license.

Value this site? Help us ensure its future.

The On the Cutting Edge website and workshop program are supported by the National Association of Geoscience Teachers (NAGT). Join today and your membership will help ensure that this site can continue to serve geoscience educators. Join NAGT today

Provenance: NAGTReuse: This item is offered under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike license http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/3.0/ You may reuse this item for non-commercial purposes as long as you provide attribution and offer any derivative works under a similar license.

Your NAGT membership helps make this site
possible. Thank you!

The On the Cutting Edge website and workshop program are supported by the National Association of Geoscience Teachers (NAGT). Your membership is helping to ensure that this site can continue to serve geoscience educators.